


That rich savor of the ludicrous

by lurknomoar



Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [3]
Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Genre: Epilogue, Gen, Glimpses into the Futures of Minor Characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-04 19:55:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20476631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: The women of Shrewsbury College, afterwards.





	That rich savor of the ludicrous

Miss Cattermole never wanted to go to Oxford, she had always wanted to be a cook or a hairdresser or something. Following Harriet’s advice, she gets her act together and manages to graduate from Oxford with a decent-ish 2.2. Having proven her worth to her parents, she then goes and becomes a cook. The university didn’t manage to instil a lasting love of History in her, but she did learn some decent writing skills, and when a local newspaper is looking for someone to write them weekly recipes, she takes to it with a flourish. She ends up marrying Pomfret, he’s a nice enough young man, but she decides to keep writing for the papers, because she’s grown to like having her own income, her own purpose. When the war hits, she’s just a minor food writer, but her cleverly economical recipes and relentless good cheer quickly makes her a household name, and Mrs Pomfret’s ‘Dishes for Victory’ column keeps many households going throughout some difficult years, making thin margarine shortcakes in the shapes of hearts and birds and eating them with pride.

* * *

Miss Wainwright will recover from her ordeal sufficiently to ace her exams. Since she is a scholarship student eager to prove herself, she continues to work herself to the bone. After the Poison-pen’s defeat, she finds a new faith in herself – if someone wanted to bring her down, she must have been something spectacular indeed. She’ll carry this newfound surety to an unspectacular, but very respectable academic career, researching female religious pamphleteers during the English Civil War, and she eventually becomes the head of a small women’s college in Kent. She falls in love with a fellow don, some nice, steady woman researching cellular biology, and after a protracted courtship that mostly consists of long walks through the hills and longer rants on their respective academic topics, they move in together. Professor Wainwright is loved by most of her students, because she is strict but fair, because she never pries but she helps if you ask her, and because she always, always roots out bullying wherever she finds it.

* * *

Beatie Wilson wants a motorbike. Her mum says motorbikes are not for girls, but her mum is not around anymore, is she. Her father shot himself because he couldn’t hold down a job, her mother got taken away because of the letters she wrote, but Beatie can’t afford to give in to despair, not while she still has a sister to look after. She gets some help from Miss de Vine, some money, some oversight: De Vine doesn’t feel responsible for the fate of either of Beatie’s parents, but she knows she should do right by the children whose lives are entangled with hers. The Wilson girls are fostered by a decent childless family, a vicar and his wife. Beatie does tolerably well in school, her little sister does great. Then Beatie washes dishes and scrubs floors until she saves up for that motorbike, and from then on, there’s no stopping. She takes to mechanics like a duck to the water, soon she’s fixing stuff in the neighbourhood for a warm meal, and less than ten years after her mother has been taken away from her, she’ll open her own garage. She wears leather jackets and ties her hair back with a red kerchief. She’s free.


End file.
